In the history of Euro-American figurative painting in Chicago, Ivan Albright (1897-1983) might be considered one of the game changers. Painters before him depicted people as strong or elegant or noble or charming or gritty. Painters after him depicted people as demented or goofy or bizarre or damaged. There was plenty of sentimentality in the work of those earlier painters, and perhaps the most sentimental of all was his father, Adam Emory Albright (1862-1957). The elder Albright specialized in barefoot boys romping through sunlit fields like erotic nymphs in Arcadia. It’s not difficult to guess why anyone, especially his own son, might wish to go in the opposite direction.
It’s also not difficult to guess why Ivan became attached to morbidity. The exhibition includes some anatomical illustrations that Albright drew while working at a military hospital in France during the First World War. The horrific scope of the casualties must have revealed “Snowden’s Secret” as described in ‘Catch 22’, Joseph Heller’s dark novel of World War Two : “by seeing Snowden's entrails spilling over the plane, he feels that Man was matter.. ..the spirit gone, Man is garbage." While other veterans from that era, like Otto Dix, depicted the aftermath of war with anger or outrage, Albright depicts the human condition as disgusting as a sack of putrefying meat.
If Albright suffered from PTSD, it did not seem to have interfered with his pursuit of a career focused more on fame than money. All but one of the paintings in this exhibit come from the artist’s estate. The single exception is the portrait of Mary Block, the founder of the Woman’s Board of the Art Institute and the wife of a trustee who would eventually become chairman. The artist, who married into a prominent publishing family, had friends in high places. The portrait is hardly flattering. The woman appears to be anxious, suspicious, grasping, and powerful. The artist called it “rather ghastly in a way”. As a dedicated patron and collector, Mrs. Block was probably more concerned with being included in the history of art than with her depiction as an unattractive woman. And perhaps wealthy Americans of the mid twentieth century realized that the upper crust no longer needed to be seen as kind, wise, righteous, devoted, or elegant. Wealth had become its own validation. It still is.
Every decade, or so, the Art Institute hauls out some of its Albright collection and puts it on temporary display. This time the theme is “Flesh”, so the show does not include “The Door” or “The Vision of St. Anthony”. Albright certainly painted a lot of flesh – but only the sagging and decrepit kind. No firm young bodies; no tender, voluptuous skin; nothing that looked healthy and vibrant. Actually, what he depicted does not look like human flesh at all – it’s more like blistering, peeling, artificial leather – unnatural in both texture and color. Like album cover art for death metal bands, it’s on the border of horrible and humorous, with a target viewership that is more about adolescent rebellion than adult responsibility. Two paintings assure us that the work of the hands (“The Lineman”) and the work of the spirit.,( “The Monk”) are without value.
Albright’s fanatic attention to detail and philosophical-sounding titles continue to lead some critics to assert that he was applying old master techniques. Notably, the signage in this exhibit makes no such claim. So much of European painting from the fifteenth to nineteenth century was about making human figures, as well as landscapes and comestibles, appear fresh and alive. The only life that concerned Albright, other than his own, was that of bacteria and fungi.
If he were still alive, he should certainly be commissioned for the official portrait of POTUS #45. He was a master of moral as well as physical decay. But does Ivan Albright still deserve all this attention? Isn’t the “Picture of Dorian Gray” sufficient to demonstrate his vision and place in the history of Chicago art? Do we really need a well born, well trained, well married, well connected, well respected white man to repeatedly tell us that human life is without meaning or hope ?
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Luke Fidler’s review responds to “Pornography in the Classroom: Another Challenge for the Art Educator” (Blandy/Congdon -1990) – an essay that discusses an Albright painting as follows:
Fidler suggests that Albright treats his subjects, both male and female, with “tragicomic care”, while “it is not he but we who supply the violence”. With which I’d agree – though I don’t see putrefaction as violent at all – quite the opposite. To quote Andrew Marvell: "The grave's a fine and quiet place"
I also don’t see why the Blandy/Condon essay should be referenced in art criticism. As it’s title would suggest (“Pornography in the Classroom”) it was apparently intended to provoke controversy rather than contemplate works of art as such. Though it does seem that New City is becoming ever less interested in making such a distinction.
Fidler does highlight, however, the following aesthetic quality:
one of the more intriguing characteristics of his paintings, namely that the teeming rot and discoloration bedeviling his protagonists is rarely matched by frenetic activity on the surface of his canvases. They’re uncannily smooth, amplifying the strange sheen of his palette in which few blacks are true blacks and every tone seems a little jaundiced
I confess that I found the "strange sheen of the palette" so repulsive, I did not notice whether the paint was thick or thin.
As I had briefly suggested, Albright's images resemble the rebellious adolescent fantasies of death metal record album covers. If Fidler would persuade us that they are something more important, perhaps he could relate them to other expressions of what he calls the "tragicomic". Hans Holbein's "Dance of Death" is one example that comes to mind. By comparison, however, Albright's work is dead in form -- as well as subject matter.
